The Tears of North Koreans

The pictures today from North Korea—the ones the regime has let the world see—make for a catalogue of public crying, a phenomenon that a number of writers have tried to understand this morning. In a post on what may follow, Evan Osnos notes that the death of Kim Jong-il was announced by a television anchor, a middle-aged woman in a black traditional dress, who was already in tears, thereby informing the public both of the news and of what their reaction was expected to be. As Philip Gourevitch writes, in a few minutes of video “we see the method and the madness of the Kims’ grim dominion over North Korea enacted in miniature.” There were also images of actors in the state theatre, their faces all contortions on the theme of grief—spokesmodels for decorous mourning, showing those not trained in the dramatic arts how it’s done.

How does a whole crowd fake tears? Barbara Demick, in “Nothing to Envy,” her book on the ravaged social landscape of North Korea, collected accounts of how ordinary North Koreans set themselves to just that task after the death of Kim’s father, Kim Il-sung, back in 1994: “It was like a staring contest. Stare. Cry. Stare. Cry,” a student told her. “Eventually, it became mechanical. The body took over where the mind left off and suddenly he was really crying. He felt himself falling to his knees, rocking back and forth, sobbing just like everyone else.”

Demick, who has also written about North Korea for The New Yorker, describes how the residents of Chongjin, a small city, brought flowers to lay at the feet of a statue of Kim Il-sung—made of bronze, two and a half stories high—and then melted “into a sea of tears and sweat”:

Those waiting in line would jump up and down, pound their heads, collapse into theatrical swoons, rip their clothes and pound their fists at the air in futile rage. The men wept as copiously as the women.

The histrionics of grief took on a competitive quality. Who could weep the loudest? The mourners were egged on by the TV news, which broadcast hours and hours of people wailing, grown men with tears rolling down their cheeks, banging their heads on trees, sailors banging their heads agains the masts of their ships, pilots weeping in the cockpit, and so on. These scenes were interspersed with footage of lightning and pouring rain. It looked like Armageddon.

As Demick also notes, some people really cried—as much out of anxiety for the disorder that might come next as anything. North Korea is a state that has never hesitated to use the worst violence against its people. There is something compelling in the faces in the crowds, quite apart from the tears; they have the expressions of people who look much older than they actually are, illustrations of the aging affect of worry and fear. What comes next in North Korea—what kind of upheaval, what sort of tears?

Amy Davidson Sorkin, a New Yorker staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.